Bound for Boredom

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

BOUND FOR GLORY

Directed by HAL ASHBY Screenplay by ROBERT GETCHELl

This land may belong to you and me, but it does not look as if it's going to belong to Bound for Glory, the soporific biopic about Woody Guthrie, the folk singer who wrote that familiar and stirring line.

Guthrie was an itchy-footed sign painter from Oklahoma who, like a lot of his neighbors, hit the road when the Dust Bowl and the Depression coincided to ravage his native ground. There were plenty of rough spots in his path, but he used these abrasions to polish his lyrical gifts. Along the way he acquired class consciousness, and his political ballads are now magically evocative of the pain and the political passions of working-class life in the 1930s. There is opportunity in this material not only to tell a curious and moving life story, but also to re-create the look and feel of migratory life in a time when it was a grim necessity rather than a camper-cushioned luxury.

But the movie blows its chance. Although Cinematographer Haskell Wexler has executed in a masterly way the visual style chosen by Director Ashby, it is at odds with the story. Diffusion filters give a falsely nostalgic, pastoral glow to landscapes forever fixed in the hard-edged photos made of the '30s by the likes of Walker Evans. Soft photography makes the movie seem sentimental even on those few occasions when it is trying not to be.

A similar softening occurs in the characterization of Guthrie himself. David Carradine is an attractive performer, but his Guthrie is all guileless sweetness.

At a guess one would say that a man who decided to roam alone, rather casually leaving wife and children behind him, and whose subsequent work tended to celebrate people in the abstract rather than the particular, is a man in capable of love as the term is usually defined. Noble as resistance to the customary may be, it generally makes for an infinitely more troubled, angry and difficult character than this movie portrays.

To be sure, Writer Getchell implies that Guthrie was something of a womanizer. He also shows Guthrie as hard on the friends who help him establish his career. But Guthrie's behavior is seen as a collection of lovable foibles, not something roiled by mysterious storms.

To put the matter simply, the sweet schnook of this film could not possibly have written Woody Guthrie's powerful songs.

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